University lecturers who breached their study bonds and agreements owe the state approximately Rs 30 billion, the Committee on Public Enterprises has disclosed.
The figure emerged at a committee meeting chaired by MP Dr. Nishantha Samaraweera, NewsFirst reported on Tuesday morning.
The committee urged officials to establish a systematic mechanism to recover the money from academics who went abroad without fulfilling their obligations, and stressed the need to monitor and address what it described as widespread breaches across the entire university system.
How study bonds work
Academic staff at state universities are routinely released on paid or partly paid leave to take postgraduate qualifications abroad, on an agreement — secured by guarantors — that they will return and serve the university for a set period afterwards. Where that service is not given, the sums advanced plus associated costs become recoverable. The liability COPE is describing is the accumulated total of those unfulfilled agreements.
The figure is a sharp departure from earlier counts
Readers should treat the Rs 30 billion figure with care, because it is an order of magnitude above the numbers the same committee has previously put on this liability, and Tuesday’s filing does not explain the difference.
In May 2023, COPE — then chaired by Prof. Ranjith Bandara — told Parliament the amount owed by university teachers who took leave for overseas postgraduate study and did not return was Rs 2 billion, according to a report in The Island dated 4 May 2023. That account put the scale of the problem in concrete terms: of 617 lecturers who had gone abroad, only 84 had made the relevant payments, and the committee asked the University Grants Commission to report back within a month on steps to recover the money from guarantors. Leave periods of up to seven years were involved.
Tuesday’s figure is roughly fifteen times that 2023 total. Several explanations are possible — a wider scope covering the whole university system rather than UGC-administered leave cases, the accumulation of interest and penalties, a different basis of calculation, or simple growth in the number of defaulters over three and a half years. The filing supports none of them specifically, and this desk has not been able to reconcile the two counts.
The earlier report is cited here as dated background only. It falls well outside the window for current sourcing and is linked above with its date so readers can weigh it themselves.
Not reported
The filing does not say which officials or institutions appeared before the committee, how many academics the Rs 30 billion is spread across, or over what period the liability accumulated. It gives no breakdown by university, no indication of how much has been recovered to date, and no deadline for the recovery mechanism it has called for. It does not report any response from the University Grants Commission, from the universities, or from academics’ representatives.
That last omission is worth flagging. When COPE has put figures on this liability before, they have been contested — the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations has publicly disputed earlier claims of academic losses of this kind. No comment from FUTA or any other body representing academic staff is included in Tuesday’s filing, and none should be inferred.
A note on sourcing
This report is single-source. The Daily Mirror and Hiru News rails were checked directly and carry nothing on Tuesday’s committee meeting, and a search across verified Sri Lankan newsrooms returned only earlier COPE and university-bond coverage. Given that the central figure is both single-sourced and sharply out of line with the committee’s own earlier statements, it is reported here strictly as COPE’s disclosure rather than as an established total, and this article will be updated if other newsrooms carry the meeting.
